[twc]

First QuoteWhat do you think about your first quote, and Marx’s use of the hegelian term “essence”?  Fire away, if you want to start a discussion.  I’ll respond.Second QuoteI’ll discuss the second quote in a following post.It can only be done justice to from the standpoint of Marx’s 1844 notes as he worked his way towards what we have come to know as the 1846 “German Ideology”, but which the new MEGA claims was not a single entity but is a heavily edited compilation from multiple original sources that were collated into a unity by Ryazanov and team.  It will be interesting to read the original mice-unchewn sources when they appear in English translation.  Third QuoteYour third quote amply demonstrates the problem of uncritical quotation, the practice of isolating a paragraph from its author’s context which alone lends it the meaning its author intended.  Here is its author’s intended context.Marx is discussing the production of use-values under the capitalist mode of production, but he temporarily changes tack to re-consider it, in abstraction, under any mode of production.

Marx, Capital, Ch. 7, wrote:

We shall, therefore, in the first place [=for the time being], have to consider the labour-process independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions.

Then follows one of the grandest of pæans to the socialist labour process ever penned by the mature Marx, which includes your extract (3).  It rivals anything written by William Morris on the joyful affirmation of our humanity engrossed in the social activity of producing use-values, alas only under socialism.Then follows a passage in which Marx reminds us of his temporary assumption, of abstracting from specific modes of production, lest we get swept away.

Marx, Capital, Ch. 7, wrote:

The labour-process, resolved as above into its simple elementary factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature;  it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase.

He then proceeds to snap us out of our reverie, bringing us back to the capitalist mode of production, where production of use-values is entirely subservient to the production of capital.

Marx, Capital, Ch. 7, wrote:

Let us now return to our would-be capitalist. …From the instant [the producer of use-value] steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist.

Thus Marx is saying, contrary to the apparent import of quote (3), when it is offered in isolation of Marx’s intended context, that the reality of the capitalist production of use-values is the very negation of joyful life affirmation, but is its exact opposite, its contradiction, namely joyless life denial.Marx is contrasting your quotation with actual capitalist production in which, instead of the producer of use-values gaining mastery over nature, under capitalism he gains subjection both to nature and to man, because neither his own labour nor the nature he engages with are his own, nor do they serve direct social needs but instead they are compelled to serve the directly anti-social means to the private end of capital expansion.There can be few clearer accounts of life denial.Your isolated quote is no affirmation of idealism, but in its intended context is the materialist denial of affirmative idealism.The best capitalist producer of use-values is worse than that of the worst of bees or spiders, for, unlike them, he is far more endowed with consciousness than they.  Lucky bees, lucky spiders.Your isolated quote, extracted from the context Marx intended, inverts, contradicts, negates Marx’s message.I suggest you reread all of the short Part III, Ch. 7, § 1 “The Labour Process or the Production of Use Values” to comprehend what Marx is really saying.This tiny section is the prelude to § 2 “The Production of Surplus Value”, which unmistakably drives the materialist nail into any implied idealist interpretation of mankind being able to chart and realize its own creative destiny under capitalism.If mankind could chart its own life-affirming destiny under capitalism, there’d be no need to replace capitalism with socialism, since we could all affirm our joy in creating use-values untrammeled under our present social system.Finally, Marx expresses emotional joy in human creation of social use-values.  But he consciously controls his emotion when he contrasts capitalism’s destruction of this joy, all the better to let his temporarily elated reader draw his own emotional response and build his own intellectually informed resolve to dismantle the capitalist mode of production that cripples him.

[twc]

Please proceed. Explain (1) what you mean by science, and (2) what you take to be the incontestable metaphysical assumptions of physics that (3) include morality.

[twc]

Like most of your claims, this one relied on the persuasive power of unexamined popular prejudice, which is far easier to sling than to rebut. Marx is owed some time for a reasoned examination and defence against your charge that he based his science on untestable and unrejectable ‘metaphysical assumptions'.You, on the other hand, have been asked to explain the Soviet Union by something other than, and superior to, the 90-year old materialist explanation of primitive accumulation of capital.Since you claim a materialist explanation is identical to Leninism, you clearly have an opinion.  Perhaps it was, as you implied, a failure of 19th century mechanical materialism, or of dialectics, or of hidden assumptions, or of whatever.  Please give us a reasoned explanation.You owe it to everyone on this forum to do more than just snipe, and you must demonstrate the explanatory power of your materialist–idealist dualism before all.Thar would be a very good practical start to “doing discussion”.  The “real shame” is your squibbing to back up the charges you so freely sling, and then duck away from.Show us how genuinely open, vulnerable and testable materialist–idealism is, and demonstrate the superiority of its explanatory power.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

All science contains 'metaphysical assumptions' (or an 'ontology'), that are 'untestable' and thus are 'unrejectable'.(1)

Quote (1) is a fatal misunderstanding of scientific practice that arises from your quasi-theological misreading of Kuhn and Lakatos.  You mistake scientific practice as being indistinguishable from religious bigotry.Modern scientific practice had to prove itself historically under surveillance of powerful anti-scientific social bigotry, whose ‘metaphysical assumptions’ were only too forcibly made cognizant to everyone from birth till death.Science was consciously designed to deal with the totally obvious fact that all human activity is based on unrecognized assumptions that can only become apparent when later they come back to bite us. As defence against this, scientists adopted the only possible practical solution, and built open testability, and reliance on vulnerability, into scientific theory.This genuine openness exposed science to all the standard charges ever levelled against it, and of which its modern practitioners are totally aware.Thus, the charge of science being only “theory” was recognized from its birth, and immediately seized upon, as in the tendentious preface by Osiander to Copernicus’s “de Revolutionibus”, our first modern scientific revolution.Thus, the charge against science being only the best we can do at present was immediately recognized and seized upon by its hostile opponents in their haste to exploit its open vulnerability.But, being open, what better testing ground for scientific theory could there ever be but scientific practice itself.  Scientific theory continually tests itself, day-in, day-out, in practical application.These obvious “weaknesses” of vulnerable, testable theory are actually the strengths of science.  They turn it into mankind’s consciously crafted practical solution to the insidious problem of how to flush out our hidden assumptions, and thereby defeat the paralysis of bigotry [your quote (1)].I totally stand by my assertion that

wrote:

Marxian materialism is a scientific abstraction from experience.  Unlike a metaphysical assumption, it is scientifically testable, and so vulnerable to rejection.

A scientific theory is founded upon internally unchallengeable abstractions.  But that is only the start of the story.Because scientific theory is directly vulnerable and testable, the foundation upon which it is built becomes indirectly vulnerable and testable.  When theory fails, it takes down its foundation with it. That’s when a foundation is revealed to be ultimately challengeable.The decisive challenge to theory comes when its foundation can no longer support its superstructure, and so can no longer perform the practical task it was designed for.  The foundation is proven to be practically worthless, an impediment to scientific progress, and so must be rejected by scientific practice.We are dealing here with the difference between Kuhnian “normal” science and Kuhnian “revolutionary” science.  Kuhn described a long-term static phase, during which the implications of a scientific principle are laboriously worked out over time, followed by a rapid dynamic phase transition to overcome the paralysis of a foundation that has been proven to be wanting.¹That is something your quote (1) misrepresents.Theoretical phases [or paradigms] are succeeded, through phase transitions, by new phases.  Transitions expose hitherto unshakable foundations to the ultimate test, and reject them along with the phase they supported.  Thereupon, Minerva’s owl spreads its wings [Hegel’s reference to wisdom coming too late to save the now-comprehended defunct phase.]A theory’s hidden assumptions are only revealed, and so can only be recognized as such, and comprehended as such, after that theory completes its phase transition into its brave new phase.  Phase transition is the scientific “revolution”, precisely as Kuhn calls it, that lays bare abstractions as mere assumptions, because they really were historically hidden from scientific scrutiny.  It is scientific revolution alone, and nothing else, that proves a theory’s foundation abstractions to have been merely historically necessary assumptions.Thus science must, and does, prove its hitherto unrecognized assumptions to be such.  That is a remarkable capability unacknowledged by quote (1).Revolution, in science and society, according to materialists, directly forces us to acknowledge theory’s ultimate subservience to the external world.  It is through revolution alone that we overcome historically necessary barriers of our own making.We are subservient to the world, and must struggle to cognize it in order to comprehend it, and act out our solutions to the problems it poses us, as well as acting out new solutions for the necessarily unforeseen problems our always temporary solutions eventually pose for us when they eventually outrun their historical course.It has always been the practice of dualists, since Kant, to dwell on the acknowledged vulnerability of necessarily open scientific practice.  Engels took them on precisely for throwing up “hidden assumptions” or “lack of closure”, or some such, as impenetrable obstacles to objective knowledge. As he replied, experiment and industry disprove them.  To ask for more disproof is to revert to a realm of philosophy, in which nothing can be disproved, or proved, by practice.Footnote¹ Marx similarly described the working out of social relations of ownership and control of the means of life.  Gould replicated Kuhn and Marx in his evolutionary punctuated equilibrium of stasis and speciation.  Hegel preceded all of them. ↩ [Back]

[twc]

LBird wrote:

I think the problem is that 'materialists' do deny ideas!

We really are dealing with a sad case here.  How can any sentient human being hold the preposterous thought you just expressed.  Nobody can discuss anything intelligently with a person who “thinks” his opponent denies ideas.This is seriously delusional.  Sadly, people can no longer take you seriously.  This is truly devastatingly tragic.

[twc]

DJP wrote:

"Materialism" isn't an explanation but a metaphysical assumption.

For Marx, this is absolutely false.Marxian materialism is only “an explanation”.  It is the explanation of consciousness by social being.Marxian materialism is a scientific abstraction from experience.  Unlike a metaphysical assumption, it is scientifically testable, and so vulnerable to rejection.Science, for Marx, is the social critique of appearance.You destroy Marx’s materialism by grounding it on an idealist foundation.  Marx grounds his materialism, in the only materialist manner possible, upon the abstraction of human social practice.Human social practice in its concrete contingency is ultimately what scientist Marx’s abstract materialism explains.

[twc]

No, LBird, your absolute squib is contemptible.You got your just deserts.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

twc continues to insist that if one isn't a 'materialist', one must be an 'idealist' (or, as a synonym, an 'anti-materialist' or a 'non-materialist'). 

Just re-read what you wrote:  if one isn’t a materialist, one must be an ‘anti-materialist’ or a ‘non-materialist’.  You even object to that.  What logic do you follow?

LBird wrote:

Marx, for example, was an 'idealist-materialist'.

Question to LBird.  When Marx was a materialist did he also listen to rocks as you insist he must.  If not, why not?  Do you listen to rocks when you practice materialism?Question to LBird.  When Marx was an idealist did he believe in the creator, or in Hegel’s Idea?  When you are in an idealist frame of mind do you believe in Hegel’s Idea?  If not, why not?  Are you a believer, an atheist or, more probably for a half-and-halfer, an agnostic?  If not, why not?Question to LBird.  When Marx was in an inextricably tangled idealist–materialist mood, how did he decide which determined which, or didn’t he ever decide when in such moods?  How do you decide whether, or when, to be an idealist and whether, or when, to be a materialist?Question to LBird.  Do you have any reliable principle for deciding when to be a materialist and when to be an idealist, or do you go simply on hunch?  Please explain as clearly as possible, since we need your guidance on this absolutely crucial lynchpin of your fabulous idealism–materialism.Question to LBird.  Why do you think, if Engels was aware of dualism, he was stupid enough to reject it?  As here

In Feuerbach Engels wrote:

If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world.

As to your meaningless non-thought:

LBird wrote:

 Marx … argued for 'theory and practice', so both 'ideas' and 'nature' are required. Neither has a more fundamental role than the other. Ideas are as important as 'material' conditions. 

So “ideas are as important as ‘material conditions’”.  What are they important for?  Are they equally important for explaining themselves?  If not, are they equally important for explaining each other?  If not, is one 60% important for explaining both, and the other 40% important?  If so, please tell us how you arrived at this golden ratio, so that we too can emulate your 60%-idealism–40%-materialism.And now to ‘morality’. 

LBird wrote:

And given the central role of creative human ideas (in conjunction with nature) in building our understanding of our world (social and natural), the role of human 'morality' cannot be excluded from either politics or science.

Who, in your condemnatory imagination, is excluding ‘morality’ from politics or science, but yourself?I’ve just gone to great length to explain, without your condemnatory urging, the process of formation of capitalist ‘morality’ scientifically.  That’s me totally including it, and not excluding it.  That’s me intimately embracing it.  That’s me recognizing the difficulty it poses for comprehending socially-dependent humans trapped in a ruthless capitalist world.  That’s me directly untangling the otherwise unfathomable interaction between being and consciousness that characterises how and why we behave as we do towards each other when one class is exploiting another.  That’s me not excluding it.Now, will you start including it in politics and science by ripping down my materialist explanation of the formation of capitalist morality.You show, all of us here, just how you would bring morality into your explanation of the Soviet Union.  I challenge you to respond to my previous post.  It would be immoral of you, the champion of morality, to shirk the moral challenge.

[twc]

LBird, you don’t have to reason with me but with everyone else on this forum.  You are answerable to them for raising undelivered-upon expectations.Instead of parading your theory, use it and prove its worth.  Show everyone else how to do it.Your pathetic excuse in your last post simply will not wash with an expectant audience.  Either your claims are vapour, or they can deliver the goods.  Demonstrate their worth in practice, you advocate of theory and practice.Also, stuart, robbo, and steve, show everyone here, and anyone else who visits this forum thread in the future, the explanatory power of your non-materialist science against traditionally agreed materialism, as adopted 90 years ago by the SPGB, and 60 years earlier than that by Marx and Engels.Don’t squib out like that moral abuser and craven intellectual coward, LBird.

[twc]

Admin.  Access to the forum has been flakey over the past days.  At last I’ve been able to connect before being timed out.Stuart.  I’m letting you call the shots and answering point by point.

stuart2112 wrote:

[twc] says “primitive accumulation” was unavoidable and necessary

 Correct.  Capitalists first needed to take possession of the means of production and to dispossess their future working class.  Morality was completely subservient to achieving this.  It is a long process of necessarily deliberate human degradation.

stuart2112 wrote:

and that morality has nothing to do with it

 False.I said exactly the opposite.  Morality has everything to do with “primitive accumulation”, whose moral function, as distinct from (and consequent upon) its economic function, is to reshape pre-capitalist morality into capitalist-class morality.Capitalist-class morality, both as agent and product of primitive accumulation, is absolutely central to the process.  Primitive accumulation is a horribly protracted process of moral attrition.In its formative stage, as an agent for bringing capitalist production into being, capitalist-class morality must be nakedly brutal towards its future working class as it shapes its future wage-slave to its exploitative needs.In its formed stage, as a product of brutal primitive accumulation, capitalist-class morality masquerades as benign towards its working class. But this new-found condescension towards the working class is no expression of universal deep-seated social connection, but of the necessary papering over of its duplicitous opposite, universal social division.I carefully chose “primitive accumulation of capital” because it is the absolutely necessary precursor to capitalism, upon which capitalism alone can rest, and without which it cannot function.Even from your opposing stance, it must be apparent to you thatsuch an historical process of proletarianization is indispensable for capitalism to function as capitalism;(ii) proletarianization can only be the dispossession of a potential, or future, working class of its private means of production;(iii) the dispossessed working class must become “morally” resigned to its absolute dependence upon the capitalist class. 

stuart2112 wrote:

that this is a matter of objective scientific fact and that you wooly minded idealists and religious nutjobs shouldn’t stand in the way of the march of history, you send shivers down my spine.

 False.  I have never ever been so cruel as to state that “wooly minded idealists and religious nutjobs shouldn’t stand in the way of the march of history”.  I have never told people how to behave.  However, I would ask you to reconsider whether your own forced hysteria, “you send shivers down my spine”, is an affectation designed precisely to tell other people how they should behave.

stuart2112 wrote:

The Bolsheviks would have agreed with you wholeheartedly.  As would Mao as he sent his troops into Tibet.

 False.And you know it to be false.  The communists are communists precisely because they claim to be able to thwart “primitive accumulation of capital” but can bypass it directly to some form of communism.  Thus, they purported not to agree with it.The standard SPGB case since the 1920s, which you’ve defended ably elsewhere, has been that(i) economic necessity predetermined that the bolsheviks would have to build capitalism by “primitive accumulation” whatever their morality and whatever they “believed”;(ii) bolshevik primitive accumulation of capital could not escape being implemented by “moral” brutality;(iii) the “moral” outcome of bolshevik primitive accumulation could not escape being a “morally” capitalist working class.Show me where the SPGB case is now wrong.

stuart2112 wrote:

Imagine your argument with a gun (state power) in its hands.  Chilling.

 Oh come now.  We don’t have to imagine that.  Primitive accumulation uses the gun (state power) in its hands everywhere it operates.  And it is operating all over the world.  If the actuality of primitive accumulation isn’t chilling enough, its almost total demolition of your favourite deep version of morality should be.If you don’t acknowledge the power of Marx’s materialist explanation of social conditions determining morality appropriate to social needs, please explain primitive accumulation in your terms.

[twc]

Challenge to the Anti-MaterialistsStuart explains the Soviet Union’s failure to introduce socialism as the consequence of a lapsed morality, commenting that a materialist explanation sends “shivers down his spine”.LBird explains the Soviet Union’s failure to introduce socialism as the consequence of a false materialist philosophy, because a materialist explanation is necessarily anti-democratic, and if we accept materialist explanations “we are all f—d”.It’s hard to know how Robbo explains the Soviet Union, but we do know that he stands above “crude” materialist explanations.It’s equally hard to know how Steve Colborn explains it, but we do know he openly scoffs at the explanatory power of the materialist conception of history.I challenge each of you opponents of the SPGB’s materialist explanation of the Soviet Union to demonstrate, to all of us, the power of your alternative anti-materialist explanation of its history.  Here’s your chance to prove the superiority of your alternative pro-idealist explanatory powers that you’ve hitherto extolled but never revealed. ProblemExplain non-materialistically the failure of the Soviet Union to implement socialism.Demonstrate in your own favourite chosen explanatory terms its failure, e.g., because offailed morality, orfalse materialist philosophy, orfalse dialectics, orwhatever alternative to the SPGB’s 90-year old materialist case you hold, and want to convince us of being the primary cause of the Soviet Union’s failure to implement socialism.Hic Rhodus!

[twc]

robbo wrote:

I note you have evaded the completely the thoroughly bourgeois implications of the argument that socialism is purely a matter of what is in our "self interests".

No, I’ve never subscribed to “self interest”.An edit of my #213 unfortunately crossed with your #214. Apologies.  However, have a go at responding to it.Primitive accumulation is, for me, the crowning scientific predictive achievement of Volume 1.  This demoralizing process is taking place all around the world, with the same callous brutality.Stuart misdiagnoses the Soviet Union as a failure of morality.  But Marx explains why morality was a necessary casualty of the unavoidable Soviet primitive accumulation of capital.I appreciate that Marx’s testable prediction relates to a transition from feudalism to capitalism, but it is such confirmation of scientific predictability that is our only guide to the efficacy of our science, and the only reliable source of our confidence in it.  Confidence instilled by successful applications of Marx’s materialist science far outweighs confidence imbibed from idealist morality.I thereby gain scientific confidence in our Object, something that morality cannot give me, no matter how sincere.  Above all, it is Marx’s materialist science that underpins the sought-for morality consequent upon our Object, and we need confidence, more than hope, that it can deliver the socialist goods.You may not agree with me, but my stated materialist position conforms to none of the stereotypical nonsense you charge me with.

[twc]

robbo203 wrote:

As I’ve said several times now the relevant criterion has to do with whom one morally identifies.  A proletarian morality implies a proletariat as the object of one's moral identification.  Just as a nationalist morality presupposes "the nation" as the object of moral identification.

You rationalize morality as depending on who you identify with.  That is morality by Rafferty’s rules.In Marx’s Volume 1 paradigm scenario, how would you decide between opposing moralities.  In a class society, force decides, but force, for an identificatory moralist, such as your moral self, is the opposite of morality,You want to turn the class struggle into one of morality transcendent of capitalism, and yet you have never once acknowledged that our materialist Object is the only guarantee we have of realizing a morality transcendent of capitalism.Without that you are calling on proletarians to assemble around something you apparently don’t acknowledge can be implemented objectively, but only subjectively.  That’s why you can repeat your idealist morality calls until the cows come home, and I’ll treat them with the contempt subjective moral suasion deserves.The class struggle is only moral if its morality is capable of being realized, and is immoral otherwise.  Proletarian morality does not exist, just like socialism does not exist, and both must be proven to continuously reproduce themselves as social necessity, or it is immoral to strive for them.One does not consciously conduct a social revolution from one world-wide mode of production into another based on the flimsy pretext of morality that is, without science, incapable of proving it can ever be realized except in the feverish imagination of those whose morality consists, apparently, in primarily identifying with a social class.

[twc]

Lewis Henry Morgan wrote:

The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction.  Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending.  It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.

If you mean no more than Morgan, then I agree.But to talk of morality under capitalism is to talk of an evanescent or vulgarized thing, that is almost always a ploy, or bond of emotional selfishness, in a world where the sole nexus between man and his fellow is naked cash payment.  It is to abuse the word, because the action it connotes has become debased by the society wherein it can only be acted out.  That is an awful situation, but don’t shoot the messenger for alerting you to the reality.Every social movement lays claim to morality above all else.  You get upset when I refuse to go down that disreputable path.  Well you’ll just have to live with it.  I refuse to play the soppy game when all sides play the morality card, and you simply play the “more morality than thou” joker.Either discuss morality theoretically, or not at all.  By the way, I assume that you are aware of Trivers’s 1970s biological “altruism” that, of course, has scant relation to human altruism, but can only be negated theoretically, and not emotionally.

[twc]

So you are at-bottom an “individual, self-aware, conscious, empathetic, sympathetic creature”, like the rest of humanity at-bottom.At-bottom humanity is powerless when its false perception of itself arises out of at-bottom necessary human practice under capitalism, now and forever it lasts.  The Party is one of the few havens that offers scope for at-bottom humanity to flourish under capitalism.But you, an at-bottom human specimen of humanity, must accordingly give liberally to all at-bottom deserving charities, and support all at-bottom human reforms for all the at-bottom inhuman ills that beset the rest of at-bottom human humanity. That is the immediate expression of everything you stated, and that the Party at-bottom opposes.All the humanity in the world is powerless to stop “primitively accumulating” capitalism wherever it emerges—formerly in Britain, recently in the Soviet Union, and currently in Africa, the Arab world, etc.—from dispossessing its future working class, bloodshed and all.  It has no choice, and morality is the casualty, and capitalism the victor over feudal [or tribal] morality’s corpse.Primitive accumulation’s task is to convert feudal [or tribal] morality into capitalist morality, and it must succeed in removing the feudal [or tribal] perceptions of moral usury from capital, whose profit, interest and rent must be perceived as moral right, and only deviations from commonly-agreed social standards perceived as immoral.If you don’t agree that the necessity of capitalism must, and does, turn morality inside out, please show me how capitalism can be brought into existence humanely, when its sole object is inhumane—to rob and to rule for private gain.Morality that is not useful to necessary social reproduction is immorality.  Social utility is the sole arbiter, the practical solution to a social problem.Marx observed that, when equal rights oppose each other, force decides.  That’s why socialism, which transcends bourgeois rights and morality, will not be based on right or morality.  Mankind will arbitrate its problems practically.You uncomprehendingly (just like the moral preacher whose bigotry extends to telling me I can’t be moral without him) assume that I must have no feelings for my fellows to pursue the materialist case. Grow up, and argue intelligently, not at-bottom like a duplicitous advertising, real-estate or used-car agent.

[Author]

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